London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
Top of the morning to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.
And here’s your London vitamin shot for today, Saturday, October 4th, 2025.
Alison was guiding her Old Palace Quarter Walk yesterday. You know the bit – St James’s Square, St James’s Palace, London’s fabulous nineteenth century shopping arcades, Jermyn Street (the upper class English gentleman’s Carnaby Street), no end of high end, very swish little private art galleries, all kinds of hidden nooks and crannies that are redolent with history and character, and of course St James’s Street, the scent of cigars and old money, gentlemen’s clubs as far as the eye can see.
Anyway, Alison gets her walkers to St James’s Street she of course takes them into Pickering Place.
One of the very best secret hideaways in all of London. Pickering Place is tiny – so small that if you sneezed in St James’s you could blow straight across it. A dark little Georgian courtyard, hemmed in by high brick, lit by the soft glow of gaslight. A place that feels like it ought to come with its own whisper.
Yes, Pickering Place – once home to diplomats, duellists, and discreet assignations. The plaque by the entrance still says it was the Texas Legation – back in the 1840s when the Republic of Texas was an independent country and had a diplomatic outpost here. Before that, it was a haunt of Regency rakes. And through it all, Berry Bros. & Rudd, the wine merchants, have stood watch – same shopfront since the 1600s, same great scales, same spirit.
So Alison’s group are standing there, half-dazzled by the atmosphere, when one sharp-eyed walker spots a small oval plaque on the wall. Black numerals: 8100.
“What’s that?” she asks.
And there it is – one of those moments when London winks at you.
Because that little oval isn’t a house number, isn’t a relic, isn’t decoration. It’s a street-lamp number. A modern tag on an ancient tradition.
It’s the Number That Knows Its Flame
Here’s the story.
Every lamp in Westminster – every elegant post, every ornate wall bracket, every lantern glowing above a side street – has a number. It’s the lamp’s passport. Its identity. Its maintenance file.
So that little “8100” plate on the wall in Pickering Place is basically the lamp’s number plate.
The all important point being, those lamps – many mounted on ornate wall brackets – need individual identification so the engineers can track maintenance and repairs. You can imagine the conversation:
“Lamp 8100, Pickering Place – mantles replaced, flame adjusted, good to go.”
Now let’s zoom out to Westminster generally. Full marks to it, Westminster still has around 300 gas lamps – the largest surviving network in the world. Not replicas. Not electrified lookalikes. Real gas lamps. Flickering, breathing, whispering light, burning on the same principle as when Victoria sat on the throne.
When you see one of those plaques – 8100, say – it’s telling the engineers: “This is me.” It’s how they know which lamp to service, which mantle to change, which flame to tune.
Because yes, ladies and gents, Westminster still has lamplighters. Flesh-and-blood craftsmen with ladders, keys, and a gentle touch. They work for British Gas, of all people, and their job is to keep London’s living time machines alight.
Every evening, as the dusk creeps up the Mall and the light fades in St James’s Park, you might see one of them – adjusting, trimming, whispering to the lamps like an old friend. It’s one of those sights that makes you fall in love with London all over again.
A City Written in Light
Let’s rewind a bit.
Gaslight arrived in London around 1807. The first demonstration was on Pall Mall – just down the road from Pickering Place. Crowds gathered as the lamps hissed and flared into life. The effect was electric – before electricity even existed.
Imagine it: London at night, suddenly revealed. The pools of shadow lifted. The rakes, the link-boys, the pickpockets all blinking in astonishment.
By mid-century, gaslight was everywhere – from the grand avenues to the narrowest courts. It changed the way London looked, the way it felt, even the way people behaved. Suddenly the night wasn’t a place of danger; it was a stage set.
And the fixtures themselves – the posts, the brackets, the finials – became part of the city’s architecture. You can still read the different eras in their design: the fluted Doric posts of the 1820s, the ornate scroll brackets of the 1850s, the crown-topped lanterns of the Edwardians.
Look up in St James’s and you’ll see them all – frozen mid-century, still doing the same job, still carrying the same warm, amber light.
The Lamp Number in the Wall
Back to our little plaque in Pickering Place.
The reason it’s on the wall rather than a post? Because the lamp itself – that graceful bracket above the alley – is wall-mounted. The engineers need a way to identify it, so they attach the number plate close by.
Hence that modest oval. 8100. A piece of quiet, unsung bureaucracy that happens to live in one of the most atmospheric corners of London.
It’s all part of the city’s enormous hidden web – thousands of small clues, codes, and identifiers that make London work while giving the rest of us something to notice, to puzzle over, to decode.
Once you know what you’re looking for, you start spotting them everywhere. Little black or white or silver numerals gleaming under lamplight, marking out the living, breathing infrastructure of history.
A Final Word in the Glow
So the next time you find yourself in Pickering Place – or along the Mall, or behind St James’s Palace – pause for a second when you see that soft, golden light spilling across the brickwork. That’s not electricity. That’s time made visible.
You’re seeing the same light Dickens saw. The same flicker that fell across the boots of a young Churchill walking home from school.
The same glow that’s kissed the windows of Berry Bros. & Rudd for two centuries and more.
And if you happen to spot a little oval plaque numbered 8100 or 7295 or whatever – give it a nod. It’s the city’s way of keeping the flame alive.
Because London, bless her, still writes her poetry in gaslight.
You’ve been listening to This… is London, the London Walks podcast. Emanating from – www.walks.com – home of London Walks, London’s signature walking tour company.
London’s local, time-honoured, fiercely independent, family-owned, just-the-right-size walking tour company.
And as long as we’re at it, London’s multi-award-winning walking tour company. Indeed, London’s only award-winning walking tour company.
And here’s the secret: London Walks is essentially run as a guides’ cooperative.
That’s the key to everything.
It’s the reason we’re able to attract and keep the best guides in London. You can get schlubbers to do this for £20 a walk. But you cannot get world-class guides – let alone accomplished professionals.
It’s not rocket science: you get what you pay for.
And just as surely, you also get what you don’t pay for.
Back in 1968 when we got started we quickly came to a fork in the road. We had to answer a searching question: Do we want to make the most money? Or do we want to be the best walking tour company in the world?
You want to make the most money you go the schlubbers route. You want to be the best walking tour company in the world you do whatever you have to do to attract and keep the best guides in London – you want them guiding for you, not for somebody else.
Bears repeating: the way we’re structured – a guides’ cooperative – is the key to the whole thing.
It’s the reason for all those awards, it’s the reason people who know go with London Walks, it’s the reason we’ve got a big following, a lively, loyal, discerning following – quality attracts quality.
It’s the reason we’re able – uniquely – to front our walks with accomplished, in many cases distinguished professionals:
By way of example, Stewart Purvis, the former Editor (and subsequently CEO) of Independent Television News.
And Lisa Honan, who had a distinguished career as a diplomat (Lisa was the Governor of St Helena, the island where Napoleon breathed his last and, some say, had his penis amputated – Napoleon didn’t feel a thing – if thing’s the mot juste – he was dead.)
Stewart and Lisa – both of them CBEs – are just a couple of our headline acts.
Or take our Ripper Walk. It’s the creation of the world’s leading expert on Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow, the author of the definitive book on the subject. Britain’s most distinguished crime historian, Donald is, in the words of The Jack the Ripper A to Z, “internationally recognised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper.” Donald’s emeritus now but he’s still the guiding light on our Ripper Walk. He curates the walk. He trains up and mentors our Ripper Walk guides. Fields any and all questions they throw at him.
The London Walks Aristocracy of Talent – its All-Star Team of Guides – includes a former London Mayor. It includes the former Chief Music Critic for the Evening Standard. It includes the Chair of the Association of Professional Tour Guides. And the former chair of the Guild of Guides.
It includes barristers, doctors, geologists, museum curators, a former London Museum archaeologist, historians, university professors (one of them a distinguished Cambridge University paleontologist); it includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actors, a bevy of MVPs, Oscar winners (people who’ve won the big one, the Guide of the Year Award)… well, you get the idea.
As that travel writer famously put it, “if this were a golf tournament, every name on the Leader Board would be a London Walks guide.”
And as we put it: London Walks Guides make the new familiar and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note… come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.